May 16, 2011

Someone's Been Reading This Blog

On August 1, 2007 The Ad Contrarian published its very first post. It was a momentous day in the great history of digital whining.

The post was called Aiming Low. It was about the massive stupidity of marketers who feel compelled to target young people because everyone around them is doing likewise. Since then I have whined and bellyached about this subject frequently.

Last week, The New York Times ran a piece called, In Shift, Ads Try to Entice Over-55 Set. The story is about the dimwits in the marketing industry who are finally starting to wake up after all these years. As I read the piece, I got the strange feeling I had read it all before. Or even worse, written it all before.

"In 1964, the first of these Baby Boomers turned 18. These people provided marketers with an astounding and unprecedented marketing opportunity... Forty years later, this is now an old way of thinking."

New York Times:

"After 40 years of catering to younger consumers, advertisers and media executives are coming to a different realization..."

Ad Contrarian:

"The social phenomenon called the Baby Boom required a new way of thinking."

New York Times:

"This amounts to a reversal in thinking that took hold during the 1960s, when advertisers first started aiming for baby boomers..."

Ad Contrarian:

"Economics and demographics tell us that young people are no longer a terribly attractive target for most marketers."

New York Times:

"...the reasons for the shift are not just demographic, they are economic."

Ad Contrarian:

"For several years now, we at Ad Contrarian Global Headquarters have been ranting about the astonishing stupidity of marketers for relentlessly chasing young people and ignoring people over 50"

New York Times:

"For decades, television has been the most determined proselytizer on behalf of the premium value of reaching consumers aged 18 to 49..."

Ad Contrarian:

Baby boomers dominate 94% of all consumer packaged goods categories.

They purchase almost 40% of consumer packaged goods

They account for 1/3 of all TV viewers, online users, social media users and Twitter users.

Even in technology categories, where marketers assume young people dominate, baby boomers "are purchasing at rates just as high as other segments, and because they are often buying for their kids, many are double-dipping."

New York Times:

"Mature consumers also seem to be spending on categories not traditionally associated with older people... they spent more than the average consumer on categories like home improvement, large appliances, casual dining and cosmetics"

They have also become heavy spenders on electronics and digital devices. The study also showed that members of the 55-to-64 age group were just as likely as those ages 18 to 34 to have high-definition televisions, digital video recorders and broadband service.

Now the Times may be brilliant when they see things as I do. But if they believe for a second that because a few marketers have crawled out from their caves and seen the light of day there's going to be a mass realization in group-think-land that they've been wrong all these years, forget about it.

I'll stick with something I wrote six months ago:

"The marketing industry is locked into a way-out-of-date time warp in which young people are the holy grail...If anything, it's getting worse."

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Ad Contrarian Says:

"Creative people make the ads. Everyone else makes the arrangements."

"Delusional thinking isn't just acceptable in marketing today -- it's mandatory.""Good ads appeal to us as consumers. Great ads appeal to us as humans."

"Social Media: Tens of millions of disagreeable people looking to make trouble."

"As an ad medium, the web is a much better yellow pages and a much worse television."

"Sometimes success in the advertising business is about sitting quietly and letting clients proceed with their hysterical delusions."

"Marketers prefer precise answers that are wrong to imprecise answers that are right."

"Brand studies last for months, cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, and generally have less impact on business than cleaning the drapes."

"The idea that the same consumer who was frantically clicking her TV remote to escape from advertising was going to merrily click her mouse to interact with it is going to go down as one of the great advertising delusions of all time."

"Nobody really knows what "creativity" is. Every year thousands of people take a pilgrimage to find out. This involves flying to Cannes, snorting cocaine, and having sex with smokers."

"Marketers habitually overestimate the attraction of new things and underestimate the power of traditional consumer behavior."

"We don’t get them to try our product by convincing them to love our brand. We get them to love our brand by convincing them to try our product."

"In American business, there is nothing stupider than the previous generation of management."

"If the message is right, who cares what screen people see it on? If the message is wrong, what difference does it make?"

"The only form of product information on the planet less trustworthy than advertising is the shrill ravings of web maniacs."

"There's no bigger sucker than a gullible marketer convinced he's missing a trend."

"All ad campaigns are branding campaigns. Whether you intend it to be a branding campaign is irrelevant. It will create an impression of your brand regardless of your intent."

"Nobody ever got famous predicting that things would stay pretty much the same."